Dangit, Harper

I was excited to get it; I was disappointed to read it. The much anticipated "follow up" to Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is no follow-up at all; rather, Go Set a Watchman is the rough draft of Lee's famous (iconic) work -- before editors, Lee's rewrites, and Capote (I dare say) got to it. I'd been hoping for a completely different book, or a stand-on-its-own sequel. Sadly, Watchman is a lumpy, disconnected "collection" of small-town vignettes --no plot, really, unless you count the angry politicizing the young adult Jean Louise (fresh out of New York, back home for a visit) hurls at her father, her suitor, her Uncle Jack and her Aunt Alexandra. Go Set a Watchman wasn't published before now because it wasn't a well-developed, interesting, memorable read. The only reason it's being published now is to sell millions of copies to Mockingbird fans who were excited to discover their beloved Harper Lee had written something --anything -- else, even if this something else turned out to be a novice writer's first (polished) draft. Go Set a Watchman isn't horrible. It just isn't very good.
‪#‎feelingduped

Gillian Flynn's got it goin' on ... if you love depraved people

Holy shitsnacks on a cracker.
Just finished Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects, and the perverse ending affected me so severely that I had to run to the bathroom to get rid of some tuna salad. Thirty minutes post-last page, I am still nauseous. Sick to my core.
Sick mostly because I know people like the (disturbed) characters in Flynn's novel, one of whom resonates so deeply that I do not think I can look her in the (pink and watery) eye anytime soon.
Ironically (?), Flynn is from the Kansas City area, which has gotten me to thinking that maybe she and I have met the same person.
Could this even be possible?
What a twisted small world we live in ... .
***
I thought Gone Girl was bad enough. The ending to that book, however, didn't so much incite physical illness as emotional pissiness. I HATED the ending and literally threw the book across the room. I cursed it and planned to write Flynn a vitriolic email, centering on the lack of verisimilitude,  but my ADD saved me from penning something pathetic that would only have served to make me come across as a jealous, idiotic fan. I think I baked brownies instead and swallowed my feelings.
***
What endears me about Flynn's writing, and what keeps me from staying up past my bedtime to read more ... more ... more, is that this chick's pen is inherently mean and taunting, and damned if her characters, as such, aren't realistic and in your face, like asshole-ish people are out in the real world.
I don't think she could write a sympathetic character if her editor demanded it ("Please, Gillian, please create a character that readers can like, for once, please try ~"). Instead, her characters are mostly repulsive in nature and occasionally, one-twentieth of the time, an eensy-beensy-bit kind, like the kid who bullies everyone in junior high and then you find out he sends all his lawnmowing money to Jerry Lewis's Muscular Dystrophy Foundation.
Furthermore, Flynn's writing, which uses fuck liberally, will offend the easily offended. In fact, even I, who's liberal and out there concerning most things, found myself squirming in my reading chair more than once while reading Sharp Objects. Flynn's writing disturbs and delights me simultaneously.

Of course, books that have the power to affect me so severely are the kind of books I reach for time and time again, like some sick addict after the crack pipe, or, in my case, a foodaholic reaching for the sixth brownie.

Can't wait to get my hands on Flynn's other book ... .

Dammit, Ayelet Waldman ...

First, there's her name: Ayelet.
I don't know how to pronounce it. I remember Oprah pronouncing it "Eye-Uh-Let," but then recently I came across Waldman's name in print, with this pronunciation: "I-Yell-It."
I am flummoxed.
I am bothered.
I am disturbed because I am bothered not knowing how to pronounce the damned name, this name of a woman I have never met, nor will possibly ever meet ~ although I was entertaining the fantasy of meeting "Eye-let" (?) one of these days at some vegan cafe in Berkley ~ considering she was, for forty-eight hours, my new literary role model.
A role model with a name I didn't know how to say.
Until I started reading Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace, Anne Tyler was the writer I most admired. Anne + Tyler: two simple pronunciations. A simple name behind beautifully written family dramas. Tyler has published dozens of novels, and I have read them all. At times, in the middle of parsing a Tyler-esque paragraph regarding a marriage, the thought has come to me that maybe, just maybe, Tyler as a person might be a bit uptight about sex and body parts: she never writes of either. Tyler as a writer could be edgier; still, Tyler's style always makes me smile.
However, after reading Waldman's bad mommy essays, I am now certain that Tyler would never describe her boobies like this (from Bad Mother's page 28): "How well I remember that rack! Those perky breasts that hovered just below my chin. Those pert nipples. That swelling cleavage. After four children and a full seventy-two months of breast-feeding, the last six of which were spent with my nipples clamped in the death vise of a breast pump, it is only by dint of foundation garments designed by teams of MIT professors who otherwise spend their days drawing up plans for the world's longest suspension bridges that my breasts achieve a shape even approximating round. When I undue (sic) the clasps, buckles, straps, and hoists of these miraculous feats of engineering, my boobs tumble
to the ground like boulders falling off a cliff. I could polish my shoes with my nipples."
She could polish her shoes with her nipples.
From that sentence alone, Waldman shoved Tyler out of first place. Here'd I gone a full decade and a half worshipping at the altar of Tyler, which was a comfortable religion, given Tyler's propensity for writing stories about family life (all I care about reading, as family life is the only life I've ever known, and thus I offer no apology for not hightailing it to the library to check out the newest political espionage thriller ~). Tyler would no more describe her nipple shoe polishing talent
than I might write about the Davinci Code, whatever that is, or pen a missive regarding 17th Century Spanish literature.
And so I had a new writer to admire. I went to the library and checked out Waldman's novel, Daughter's Keeper. I watched a few YouTube videos. I enjoyed thinking about Waldman and her novelist husband Michael Chabon, about how cool their lives must be, two writers in the same house.
It was exciting for me to know that both Waldman and Chabon had spent time at MacDowell (Chabon is actually on the board of directors there, maybe even the president ~). I was jealous that not only was Waldman's writing superior and beautiful in its structure, but she, too, was pretty and petite and had glorious green eyes. Also, she got to sleep with the oh-so-handsome blue-eyed
Pulitzer-prize winning author. (People magazine once wanted to place Chabon on its sexiest men list.)
And then I got to Chapter 11, and as quickly as Waldman rose to glory in my eyes, she fell off the pedestal, twisting her ankle on the way down. In this chapter titled "Rocketship," Waldman describes having had an abortion (a "genetic abortion"), with a sense of scientific detachment and a direct explanation, which I found disturbingly hard-hearted. (" Rocketship," explains Waldman, was the "place-holder name Zeke had come up with while we waited to find out the baby's gender." Zeke is one of Waldman and Chabon's four living children.)
Just when I was thinking of writing Waldman a fan letter, I decided I no longer wanted to meet her. I might be pro-choice politically, but I am definitely against "Let's have an abortion!" because a prenatal test shows a genetic defect might ~ might ~ cause physical or emotional or intellectual retardation. Writes Waldman: "I did calculations in my mind of what I could tolerate ~ physical malformations, fine. Who cares? I measure five feet ~ I bet there are parents in the world who'd be horrified at the prospect of having a child doomed never to grow taller than that. But developmental delay. That shook me to my core. Mental retardation. I couldn't go there."
Ouch.
Oh my.
You've got to be kidding me.
I was no longer infatuated with this former lawyer wordsmith whose constant use of five-dollar words simultaneously repulsed and attracted me. Look: I am an active reader. I read with a yellow highlighter and a pencil for annotations. I enjoy learning new words. With Waldman's book, I got out my iPhone and went to my Merriam-Webster app. I needed to look up these words, fancy-schmany five-dollar words that Waldman used liberally: exigency, endogenous, pernicious, paucity, screed, abnegation, capacious, apogee, apraxia, exiguous, and Pyrrhic, the one with the capital P. There is a difference in meaning between Pyrrhic and pyrrhic, but I didn't know this until I consulted my dictionary.
I was attracted to Waldman's clear intellect and command of the English language. I remember thinking, after looking up the twentieth or so unknown word, that if I ever did meet "Eye-let" (?), I would be intimidated by her intelligence and articulate ways. I was repulsed, however, by what I considered an ostentatious display of vocabulary. Every now and then I felt a childhood taunt resurfacing: nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah, I know more words than you do.
I was annoyed that Bad Mommy was using words that most mommies, good or bad, ever employed. Even then, though, I was OK with feeling deficient in my vocabulay.
But the abortion, described in detail, a death necessary to keep a potentially damaged human being from being born? Couldn't identify with that, no matter how I turned it around in my head, tried to intellectualize it. Waldman's book just left me feeling sad and empty. And so very, very grateful for the three children I brought into the world, never knowing whether they would be "perfect," but choosing life for them, anyway.

     
               

#12 Reason Having No Money Sucks

I haven't worked since March of this year. I was gainfully employeed as a teacher, and then as a nanny up until my mom died March 25, which is when my world kinda sorta fell apart. Went into Depression Mode and stayed there, under the covers, for about a month. Would climb out and get showered and dressed, but then something would trigger a  memory of my mom ~ big things, like seeing women out in public with their moms; little things, like passing the Little Debbie display at Price Chopper, as my mom loved her some oatmeal creme pies ~ and then I was back to the bed and not brushing my teeth. You know you're at the edge of your sanity when you stop brushing your teeth.
No work? No money. Well, none of my own. Thank God I am married to a wonderful and generous man who is gainfully employed and has allowed me as much grieving time as I needed (and continue to need). Without my own paycheck, though, I feel very much like an adolescent holding her hand out for movie money, or for lunch money to get together with the girls.
Since March, since no paycheck, I have given up lots of material goods, purchases that I never really needed, now that I come to think about it, but sure as hell wanted. I used to buy whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. My generosity soared. Lots of gifts for the children and for friends. Lots of dinners out. I had Olive Garden's menu memorized. Lots of clothing and shoes bought. Daughter wanted a $200 pair of Uggs? Her third pair? OK.
Look: I am not a brat. I did have the money, and I did spend it, but I donated a lot of money, too. I bought food for local food pantries. I paid for dozens of Starbucks purchases for cars that were behind me in line. I bought classroom gifts that students "bought" with good behavior tickets I'd handed out during the week. I took donuts into school, and full-size birthday cakes and gallons of ice cream when a student had a birthday.  And I bought a shit-ton of books; I was a regular at Borders before it closed (I am still sad about this~) and then I turned to Barnes and Noble and, eventually, amazon.com, although I am ashamed to admit that mail-order approach, considering amazon's one BIG reason Borders shut down.
I bought new-release books, both fiction and non-fiction; I bought enormous coffee table books; I bought poetry anthology books, both hardcover and trade fiction; I bought home design books; I bought anyone's memoir or autobiography. I bought cookbooks. I bought little gift books, you've seen 'em, the lilliputian quotation books meant for teachers, or for women, or for mothers. If it was published, I bought it. And if I bought it, read it, and loved it (Garth Stein's Racing in the Rain, for example ~), I bought half a dozen more copies and gave those away.
And now, now that I have no extra money, I have had to stop buying books.
It hurts. My withdrawal from Barnes and Noble is painful: I am an alcoholic who must stay away from the pub.
How to compensate? I go to the library. A lot, like three times a week. Am I reading that many books every week? No, but I am a book junkie; I get my fix by perusing the shelves and carrying as many books to checkout as my arms can hold. Then I bring them home and set them on my dining room table, artfully arranged, and I get a euphoric sense of possibility just having them there. That's what books do for me: they promise a future for me that would be different if I did not have them.
How does anyone NOT read? There's so much to be learned and to be considered, so much to be absorbed.
Books think for me. Wish I'd been the first to claim that. However, attribution goes to Charles Lamb, Essays of Ella, (1823), which I know because I got it out of a book I own called The Quotable Book Lover.
One more quote, before I leave this post:
"Books must be the axe to break the frozen sea inside me." ~ Kafka (1883-1924)

Food memoirs: yummy!

Know that FiftyFiftyMe Challenge that I started back in January? Read fifty books and see fifty movies in one year? Well, I'm on schedule to meet that goal in terms of theaters and movie rentals. But the reading? VERY behind. Me, get behind in reading? Say it isn't so. Very unusual. I enjoy reading more than many people enjoy breathing.
The reading was going too slowly; I wasn't enjoying it. Literary fiction? Turns out it's not my thing. I wanted it to be my thing, just like I wanted hot tea to be my thing, thinking that it was cultured and a little Bohemian and literary, but no matter how much I tried, it turns out I just don't like hot tea. Not with honey, not with lemon. Iced tea? Sure, sign me up. Hot tea? No. I've tried, this tea thing, for about five years now. It's not going to happen for me. I accepted the defeat. I have stuck with coffee, which appeals to me in all its forms ~ hot, cold, lukewarm, iced, frozen.
So what's up with the slow-go with the reading? I was trying to be too cultured, thinking that literary books would make me happy, or smarter, or more refined. Turns out refinement and I don't mesh too well. Marilynne Robinson might have won the Pulitzer for fiction (GILEAD) and the Orange Prize for HOME, but her writing makes me want to pull out pieces of my hair. Check out this passage:
  
          An excerpt from HOME (page 69):
   
 "As she considered the prayer she was not yet disconsolate enough to put into words, the unwelcome realization came to her that she loved Jack and yearned for his approval. This was no doubt inevitable, since it was assumed to be true of the whole family, separately and together, excluding in-laws, who might hever have met him or even heard his name, and who could only be a little amazed by the potency of this collective sentiment if by some means they became aware of it. He was the black sheep, the ne'er-do-well, unremarkable in photographs. None of the very few stories that mentioned him suggested the loss of him could have been wholly regrettable. It was the sad privilege of blood relations to love him despite all. Glory was thirteen when he left for college, having been by that time ignored by him for years. And here she was in middle age feeling the fact of his touchy indifference a judgment on her, so it seemed to her, though he had been so grievously at fault, and her intrusions all those years ago, her excesses, whatever he might have called them, were no such think ~ she had defended them in her mind a thousand times and would defend them to his face if the occasion ever arose, which God forbid, God forbid."

AAAARRRRGGGHHHH.
After nine days ~ nine DAYS! ~ of trying to read this damned book, I made it to page 110 and have learned nothing about anything, only that Glory and her brother are sister and brother and he's aloof and she's milquetoast and their father is dying and now they're both in the same home they grew up in. Occasionally Glory makes Jack coffee; sometimes he smokes a cigarette out on the porch.
AAAARRRRGGGHHHH.
  
Breathe, Kathleen. Breathe.
Always the problem solver (i.e. middle child), I made the decision four days ago to read only what truly interests me (as of this summer): food, and the writing of food and food products.
So I threw HOME by famed and acclaimed literary novelist Marilynne Robinson across the floor; I suggested to Millie that she eat the edges off the boring-ass book. She said No. It wasn't her thing, either. She requested something meatier.
I then went to my bookshelves and started looking for books that were about my favorite subject: eating. First up: A HOMEMADE LIFE: stories and recipes from my kitchen table, by Molly Wizenberg, and this, THIS, is what I was received. On page 19.

     "I know there are a million recipes out there for pound cake, and probably berry versions, too, but as you can see, I consider this one to be very important. It accompanied be through crucial times. It's also delicious, and it's my mother's, and more than any of that, it has the lightest, most delicate crumb I've ever seen on a pound cake. In fact, I'm tempted to call it a butter cake instead, because the word pound is too heavy for what is actually going on here. It's rich, yes, but not too much so, and its crumb is fine and tender. The batter is very smooth, and folded gently around fragile berries and scented with fruity liqueur, it bakes up into the kind of cake that you can't help but want to eat outdoors. Preferably on a picnic blanket, with your mother."

Well. I gobbled up Wizenberg's book in one day. ONE DAY. I would have read it straight through, but there was a shower to take and beds to make and laundry to do and groceries to buy and a dog to let in, let out, let in, let out, let in, let out. And it wasn't a short book: At 313 pages, it was, really, over way too soon. I wanted more from this writer who isn't considered literary, but, GUESS WHAT? is readable! I did not have to reread a single paragraph. I got it from the get go. Wizenberg made me laugh. She made me cry. Really, there were tears, because in the middle of the book, she writes about her dad dying in the family's den, and there's skin mottling going on, and hospice nurses involved, and this kind of thing hit way too close to my heart, but I plowed through my tears and kept going.
When I finished A HOMEMADE LIFE, I went back to my bookshelf and grabbed FINDING MARTHA'S PLACE: My Journey Through Sin, Salvation, and Lots of Soul Food, by Martha Hawkins with Marcus Brotherton. Consider these words about lima beans, from the introduction:

     "The lima beans at Martha's Place are cooked with a whole lot of love. When you put them against your lips they feel plump, like you was smooching the back of your baby grandson's knee. The beans are soft and piping warm, straight out of the pot they was cooked in. They're cooked in together with a lot of good country butter, and flavored with salt and pepper and a few kitchen secrets only a handful of folks know. And if you close your eyes and let them, those lima beans will remind you of sitting at home with all the people you love, and on the supper table in front of you is spread a country banquet on a red-checked cloth, and all of your friends are enjoying themselves and diving in and helping themselves and joking together and having a good time. Those lima beans are on my menu because I know how food can become more than just food. It's what a body uses for change. Like crackers and grape juice passed around at church, food can become what centers things when everything has gone astray."

Now THAT's beautiful writing. Why didn't Martha Hawkins win some kind of literary prize?